Ice Age art exhibition at the British Museum

We managed to sneak into the thankfully extended Ice Age art exhibition at the British Museum last weekend. I would heartily recommend it, were it not for the fact that it has actually, finally closed; and the geographical distribution of its exhibits means here'll probably never be another like it, at least for decades. But while it's no substitute, this LRB piece gives you some idea of its mystery and ambiguity.

For that's what the exhibition had, despite the quasi-certainty of the literature posted up on the walls and exhibits: ambiguity. Its premise was that the advent of artistic representations - especially abstract or unreal/mythical ones - heralded the dawn of a truly "human" way of thinking, of imagining the self in the world, and all that such a concept might entail. But however much you found yourself agreeing with that broad premise, there was still an unknowable experience - of being an early, thinking human - at the heart of each piece of "art".

Was it art? Did its makers see it as art? Were those apparently intentional destructions evidence of a magical or mythical mode of thought? Did those who were the first to ever see the exhibits, see them the way we see them: in any way at all? At a certain point, even the historians and researchers have to simply shrug, and grasp blindly, instinctively at how we feel the human condition should feel. Sometimes empathy feels very much like a learned and unreliable skill.